It’s less than a couple of weeks until Christmas. After a week, the days will start getting longer again. This year has been insanely long and difficult for all of us. I believe 2021 will be much better.

I started in a new job in October and that has kept me busy during the weekdays. I upgraded my home office setup to contain another 5K display, which probably is a bit of an overkill to have. MacOS is not really so great with a multi-display setup but at least I can have my code editor, terminal window and browser visible all the time.

We thought that the autumn came early but here we are again, having temperatures of nearly 30ºC in the middle of September. I don’t mind though. I’ve always been more of a summer person.

Quite a few things happened after my previous post. We’re still in the middle of the pandemic. Lockdown is over but new restrictions have been set after the number of cases started rising again. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we went back to the square one.

I had totally missed Haken until very recently. I remember having an opportunity to see them live in 2019 but I was busy with something else and didn’t want to squeeze another gig in my diary.

Haken are sounding quite a lot like Between the Buried And Me but without the growl vocals and their songs are shorter. It’s a mix and match of different styles but stays pretty well in the progressive metal territory. If you’d put Dream Theater, Karnivool and Between the Buried And Me in a mixer, you would possibly get the base ingredients of Haken out.

Hello from the world of isolation and social distancing!

As I don’t have better things to do, I decided to finally give some love to this blog. I updated the dependencies (yeah, got warnings about vulnerabilities…) and refactored the build system. It’s still not ideal and I had completely forgotten how everything works. That’s not really a surprise as I initially migrated this site from WordPress.com to a Hugo static site generator about 2 years ago.

The second pick on my albums of the decade list is The Forest Seasons by Wintersun.

I heard Wintersun’s music for the first time in 2006 when I started getting more and more into folk metal. I have no memory of how I found the band, but back then they had released only one album. Everyone was waiting for the upcoming masterpiece, later to be titled as Time I, but that’s not really their best album. Don’t get me wrong though, it is an insanely good album as well and has the most beautiful intro I’ve ever heard.

My first pick for the albums of the decade is Until the Water Runs Clear by Black Casino and the Ghost.

I found this band in early 2016 when they were warming up for Kula Shaker at Roundhouse. I had just agreed to accept an offer for a job in Berlin and was packing my belongings in London. I felt sad and didn’t really want to leave, but it was such a great opportunity to be able to live in a new country that I had to take it.

Once again I totally forgot to write anything on this blog. Nothing unheard of though.

I had a longer break in writing for various reasons.

Reason number one might have been pure laziness, but I also got a new laptop and I didn’t want to spend too much time installing apps and configuring my development environment. Only the ones that I couldn’t live without. This blog requires quite a few moving bits and wasn’t on the top of the priority list.

The internet! The internet is broken! Our broadband provider Relish has usually worked just fine without any major long-lasting hiccups. Sometimes the speed hasn’t really met our expectations, but it’s a wireless 4G broadband. It’s not fibre!

Last Sunday, everything suddenly changed.

Constant hiccups! The connection dies, doesn’t work at all until the router gets rebooted. Speed drops below 56k modem level and frustration grows beyond the limit where it’s trying to make us crazy, constantly pushing the anger-o-meter to the reddest of the red hue of the spectrum.

After dreaming of a vinyl player for years, I finally decided to get one.

I bought a Rega Planar 2 turntable, which is connected via Rega Fono Mini A2D pre-amp to the line-in connector of a Sonos Play 5 speaker.

The setup is not perfect though as the pre-amp doesn’t have a volume output control at all. The only way to adjust the volume is to access the room settings in the Sonos app and change line-in level from there. The built-in volume control in Sonos is disabled for line-in signal. Maybe I’ll get a better pre-amp some day.

I was born in Finland, but I moved abroad in the end of 2014. That was my long time dream that had been bothering me since my early 20’s. So far I haven’t really wanted to move back.

Today I’m flying to Finland for a holiday. It’s a little bit special trip for me as I haven’t been there in over 15 months. That’s the longest period I’ve been away from my home country.